active appeals to real
life--a life to which we are always seeking to adjust ourselves, and
in which we are always looking to find our place. The quest for
salvation itself is such an effort to adjust our own life to the
world's life. And if the world's life finds our efforts to define our
relation to the world's actual and perfectly concrete experience
inadequate, then our assertions are in just so far false; they lead in
that case to blundering actions. We fail. And in such cases our
opinions, indeed, "do not work."

All this I myself insist upon. But next I ask you to note that the
very significance of our human life depends upon the fact that we are
always undertaking to adjust ourselves to a life, and to a type of
experience, which, concrete and real though it is, is never reducible
to the terms of any purely human experience. Were this not the case;
were not every significant assertion concerned with a type and form of
life and of experience which no man ever gets; were not all our
actions guided by ideas and ideals that can never be adequately
expressed in simply human terms; were all this, I say, not the case,
then--neither science nor religion, neither worldly prudence nor
ideal morality, neither natural common-sense nor the loftiest forms of
spirituality would be possible. Here I can only repeat, but now with
explicit reference to the active aspect of our opinions {148} and of
our experience, the comments that I made in my former lecture. Man as
he is experiences from moment to moment. What is here and now, not
future "workings," not past expectations, but the present--this is
what he more immediately gets and verifies. These momentary
experiences of his, these pains and these data of perception, are what
he can personally verify for himself. And to this life in each instant
he is confined, so far as his own personal and individual experience
is concerned. But man _means_, he _intends_, he _estimates_, he
_judges_ life, not as it appears to him at any one instant, but as "in
the long run," or "for the common-sense of mankind," or as "from a
rational point of view" he holds that it ought to be judged. Now I
again insist--there is not one of us who ever directly observes in his
own person what it is which even the so-called common-sense of mankind
is said to verify and find to be true. The experience which "mankind"
is said to possess is not merely the mere collection of your momentary
feelings or perceptions,